the national
temper and mind by helping the nation to agree in opinions and
inclinations. The stage alone can do this, because it commands all human
knowledge, exhausts all positions, illumines all hearts, unites all
classes, and makes its way to the heart and understanding by the most
popular channels.

If one feature characterized all dramas; if the poets were allied in
aim--that is, if they selected well and from national topics--there
would be a national stage, and we should become a nation. It was this
that knit the Greeks so strongly together, and this gave to them the
all-absorbing interest in the republic and the advancement of humanity.

Another advantage belongs to the stage; one which seems to have become
acknowledged even by its censurers. Its influence on intellectual and
moral culture, which we have till now been advocating, may be doubted;
but its very enemies have admitted that it has gained the palm over all
other means of amusement. It has been of much higher service here than
people are often ready to allow.

Human nature cannot bear to be always on the rack of business, and the
charms of sense die out with their gratification. Man, oppressed by
appetites, weary of long exertion, thirsts for refined pleasure, or
rushes into dissipations that hasten his fall and ruin, and disturb
social order. Bacchanal joys, gambling, follies of all sorts to disturb
ennui, are unavoidable if the lawgiver produces nothing better. A man of
public business, who has made noble sacrifices to the state, is apt to
pay for them with melancholy, the scholar to become a pedant, and the
people brutish, without the stage. The stage is an institution combining
amusement with instruction, rest with exertion, where no faculty of the
mind is overstrained, no pleasure enjoyed at the cost of the whole. When
melancholy gnaws the heart, when trouble poisons our solitude, when we
are disgusted with the world, and a thousand worries oppress us, or when
our energies are destroyed by over-exercise, the stage revives us, we
dream of another sphere, we recover ourselves, our torpid nature is
roused by noble passions, our blood circulates more healthily. The
unhappy man forgets his tears in weeping for another. The happy man is
calmed, the secure made provident. Effeminate natures are steeled,
savages made man, and, as the supreme triumph of nature, men of all
clanks, zones, and conditions, emancipated from the chains of
conventionality and